Moles versus Mulots

[Guerambault]

Iceni,

I desperately need more info on the mulot. Here I have been in the Loir marvelling at the lack of moles this year when 2 days ago a creature went from one end of a border to the other moving from plant to plant, just under the surface with no mole hill in sight! I presume it is the mulot although I have never seen him. How can I tell who is the culprit? There is 2 or 3 very round holes in the ground - would this be him? I cannot feel very sentimental about whoever is causing this devastation as he has killed off 9 months of waiting for hard wood cuttings to turn into plants. I have cherished them lovingly, giving them everything they could possibly need only to find everything felled in one evening!. I am truly sorry but if there is no other remedy it will have to be rat killer but where do I put it. Down the hole?

 

[Iceni]

To the best of my knowledge the moles do not eat the plants - they just make hills and tunnels - this they are doing in our lines of sweetcorn - we are just waiting for them to come up to see how much devastation they have caused - sometimes they just displace them and they come up in the hills.

Mulot tend to eat the base of the plants (25% of our leeks tend to go to mulot). The make tunnels and holes but never hills.

We make sure that any rat poison we use is not able to get into the environment, 2 litre waterbottles make good poison holders, put the poison in the bottom of the dry bottle, lay the bottle on one side near a hole and put a cover above the hole - use a flat stone or a tile. You can also place the poisoned grain into a hole and cover again with a tile or a flat stone. We got better results in the bottles and were sure that nothing else got it by mistake. Be careful with the holes, many of our holes are now filled with toads - wonderful creatures that eat all sorts of nasties such as slugs that do untold damage. The mulot tend to make nests with leaves in the ground and die there - very strange and sweet but I am always glad when I find a dead one. If you use a membrane to cover the soil and deter weeds the mulot seem to find this heaven and multiply under the cover and then come out and devastate the plants even more.

Hope that this helps.

[Guerambault]

Thank you very much for the info. I shall now go and dig up a plant which is dying to look at its roots and proceed according to what I find. The moles have also started to be active so we may have some of each! How awful to lose such a large percent of leeks, I Always get despondent when the mole gets busy, they cause so much damage in so little time. And we are still checking the potatoes 3 times a day and picking off the colorado beetles and eggs and dealing with the blackfly on the broad beans. Not so easy this organic gardening. Our neighbours think we are mad. At first sighting out comes the appropriate spray. To make matters even worse our stray cat comes and eats the lizards. Still there are some friends around (and talking of leeks) - when my husband was watering them the other evening up popped a small toad who either fell into the hole or was thinking of making it his home until he had cold water poured on him. We haven't seen him since!